Who? After several ideas were bounced around several people it ended up just me…

What About It?

As with the ILW Smart Data Hack earlier I wasn’t in the best place when I attended CompSoc’s first hosting of an MLH hackathon. I didn’t particularly put much effort into forming a team as I wasn’t feeling great and didn’t particularly want to disappoint any team members.

To begin with I found out that my VM wasn’t working and spent some time installing a dual boot with Fedora Linux which put my laptop out of action for a while, so I spent some time trying to complete various mini games and tasks. I wasn’t particularly motivated once things got going again but nonetheless attempted to make a terrible front end for a website (good old Bootstrap) and use the Twitter API and find some others using Python but never even finished those, let alone build a scraper as I had planned.

Image by Erin Nolan 2015 | pigeonsblue.com

Image by Erin Nolan 2015 | pigeonsblue.com

I spent a lot of time playing with the Lego that was provided, creating a pointless storyboard but didn’t have anything coding-wise worthwhile built in the end to submit, which actually made me even more frustrated with myself than before (combined with the inevitable hackathon sleep deprivation of course). I did however get to say that I hacked the Big Cheese (our Student Union cheesy club night) for a mini-game.

An unexpected bonus came a day after the event finished however when I won the raffle done by Thalmic Labs and got a Myo Armband sent in the post!